{"id":640,"date":"2005-12-03T20:57:45","date_gmt":"2005-12-04T01:57:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.net\/?p=640"},"modified":"2005-12-03T20:57:45","modified_gmt":"2005-12-04T01:57:45","slug":"on-xbox-360-madness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/?p=640","title":{"rendered":"On XBox 360 Madness"},"content":{"rendered":"

People need a sanity check–you can buy an XBox 360 system on eBay for 11 million dollars<\/a>.<\/p>\n

I don’t expect that anyone would match Jack Dell’s “Buy It Now” price–there are better things one can do with 11 million dollars–but I have to wonder at the thought process that leads someone to put up an XBox 360 system with a pie-in-the-sky price.<\/p>\n

Let me add a personal aside. I haven’t purchased a 360 system yet–with the quanities on the system being as tight as they are I felt it a better thing to allow another customer on my pre-order list to purchase the system I had pre-ordered back in May. My company takes a very dim view of employees selling merchandise they purchase in the stores on eBay; an employee that sold a 360 on eBay at a profit would put his job at jeopardy. (Someone’s going to ask why, and the reason is that it’s essentially unfair to the customers who come into our stores; we have access to products in a way that our customers do not, and using our employee access to product to turn a profit abuses the customer\/employee relationship.)<\/p>\n

Here’s an anecdote. I received a phone call at the store a few days ago, Wednesday if memory serves. The man on the other end of the phone wanted to know how scarce 360 systems would be through the holidays. I gave him the best information I had–that Microsoft was planning on shipping them out on a weekly basis to stores, that for many buyers it would be a case of being in the right place at the right time, and that while the situation looked tight now<\/i> I felt confident that if he wanted to buy a system in the week leading up to Christmas he would probably be able to do so.<\/p>\n

He then told me his reason for asking about XBox 360 availability. He bought one, a Core unit, on the 22nd of November, and he put it up for auction on eBay. The closing price on the auction? Over a thousand dollars. However<\/i>, that thousand dollars didn’t cover his reserve price, so he was trying to decide what to do.<\/p>\n

That’s his<\/i> thought process.<\/p>\n

This is my reaction.<\/p>\n

Some idiot on eBay was willing to give the guy on the phone a seven hundred dollar profit, and that wasn’t enough<\/i> for him? What the hell does this guy want<\/i>?<\/p>\n

A sucker is born every minute. A fool and his money are soon parted. I could quote a dozen more, and every day something with the XBox 360 convinces of the inherent truth of these even more.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

People need a sanity check–you can buy an XBox 360 system on eBay for 11 million dollars. I don’t expect that anyone would match Jack Dell’s “Buy It Now” price–there are better things one can do with 11 million dollars–but I have to wonder at the thought process that leads someone to put up anContinue reading “On XBox 360 Madness”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48,229],"tags":[228,4091,4124,429],"class_list":["post-640","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-video-games","category-work","tag-eb-games","tag-video-games","tag-work","tag-xbox","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/640","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=640"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/640\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=640"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=640"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=640"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}